In today's economy, new products are being introduced and brought to the market at a faster and faster rate. People within the organizations that are releasing the products must be kept up on the presence of the new products and the new features that the products offer. However, getting information about such products to the pertinent people, such as marketing, sales and other personnel, can be difficult, especially in organizations having more than one location. Furthermore, it is not enough simply to get the information to the right people, organizations must insure that the information is transformed into useful knowledge regarding the operation, use, etc. of the product.
A traditional method of distributing product information include conducting training sessions in which a person who has been trained regarding a product trains further employees of the organization. This approach has several problems. There is a lag time between the point of needing to know the information and the actual delivery of the information. There are time and cost considerations for the trainer to travel through the organization and performing training sessions, and difficulties in scheduling training sessions can prevent attendance of necessary personnel. Another method of disseminating information is to prepare a written description of the product and to send the description to the people who require it. However, with this method, there is no way of tracking who within the organization has received and read the material, the recipient cannot ask questions in a contemporary manner and professional writers might have to be hired in order to prepare a written document that gets the necessary information across and is easy to understand.
The efficient and thorough dissemination of information is not only important in product-related markets, but also in service-related markets, in which information about a new service offered by an organization must be disseminated to the pertinent parties, and in any other situation in which information must be disseminated to a large or disperse group of people.